Identity and brand design that holds your brand up
Your logo is not your brand – and equally – your brand is not your logo. These two get mixed up often enough.
A logo is in fact the visual entry point into your brand for most consumers. It’s the front door of your brand identity, supported by other visual elements (the ‘look and feel’) including brand colours, iconography, typography, image treatments and supporting textures or patterns.
Beyond your brand identity sits your brand – encompassing your business offering (what it is and what makes it unique), values (who you are and what your brand stands for) and positioning (the strategy used to set your business apart from your competitors).
Simply, your brand is what people feel about your offering, product or service. It’s what they say about it when you’re not in the room.
Publication design that keeps them reading
I do love a good publication design.
And we all know when we’ve picked up a bad one. There is no quicker way to disengage your reader than page after page of text with no variation or breakout copy, zero white space, margins that are too tight, heading levels all over the place and no visual relief. It’s exhausting.
The page content might be right up their alley but if it’s not put together well, their brain will say This is hard – I’m not doing this, and they’re off.
When designing for multi-page documents – be it an annual report or a brochure – I engage your reader through a well-built hierarchy of information and visual relief throughout the document. When a hierarchy is done well, you don’t even notice it – it just makes sense to your brain, with no barrier to accessing the information on the page.
My aim is always to:
— Break down text into easily digestible chunks of information
— Question what the takeaway from each page should be
— Use imagery, icons and breakout copy for visual interest
— Utilise white space, dark backgrounds, boxing things, keylines etc to help divide your content and break things up for the eye.
Point of sale to guide your next customer
For the past 15 years I’ve worked on point of sale and marketing collateral for Google hardware (think Pixel phones, Nest products and Chromebook – work samples available on request).
The result is a keen understanding of the visual content and information required to engage a customer amidst the noise. Well-built point of sale is there to guide and assist your customer through the purchase process.
— What’s going to first catch their eye from across the room/road/aisle?
— What’s next in their field of vision as they approach your product?
— What are the final details required at shelf-level to help them make up their mind?
Great visuals and palatable blocks of well-crafted copy are both vital in the customer decision-making process.
Packaging design that delights
Good packaging creates an immediate and powerful connection to your customer. It can literally stop them in their tracks. It’s not the colours that have spoken to them – not the fonts, not the tone of voice, not the design elements and textures, or the icons, or even what the pack’s made from and how it catches the light as they pick it up. It’s the uniquely crafted combination of all of the above.
A great packaging solution can often be the difference between a customer selecting your product off the shelf, instead of the one next to it.
Finished artwork that hits the specs
Ready to hit GO on your next press ad, package, social ad, web banner?
The final stage is finished art, and this is where attention to detail can mean the difference between seeing your thing out in the world (yay) vs. a costly reprint (urgh…that sinking feeling).
Finished art spans all sorts of techniques, including:
— Finding that teeny typo in your approved copy
— Adjusting digital artwork for pixel-perfect output
— Setting up your latest packaging solution for print on a certain substrate
— Specifying coated or uncoated inks for a printed piece
— Applying inkweight settings so your newsprint ad doesn’t come out dark and murky
I’m also great with grammar. I’m not a professional proofreader but I’ll happily make suggestions to improve wording/tighten things up along the way.
No, you really don’t need all those commas. How about an em dash? Lovely!